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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
Seek First To Understand…..
The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People was originally published on August 15, 1989. Habit 5 starts with, “Seek first to understand……” It’s foundational to everything we do, whether in our business, community, or personal relationships. Yet it seems to be one of the most difficult habits to live by. And it is one of the most important habits for us to exercise in learning, growing, and achieving our objectives. Despite how well intended we are, too often, we make assumptions or leap to conclusions, without first understanding. We may have a well defined ICP, we know the key issues […]
Forcing Customers To Buy The Way We Want To Sell!
There’s a fascinating article in HBR this month, A Better Way To Link Sales And Marketing. There’s a lot “right” about this article. It offers very good insights about how we engage our customers very effectively, consistently, and efficiently. It talks about how we integrate our communications strategies effectively across all parts of the organization–marketing, sales, service, and so forth. It talks about how we can manage our interactions to focus on the concerns customers express in their buying effort. The concept is what they call, the Digital Customer Hub (DCH). It’s not a new concept, Digital Buying Rooms have […]
Our Customers Don’t Care About How We Want To Sell To Them!
We engage in endless debates/discussions about our GTM strategies and how we want to sell to our customers. We argue about approaches, methodologies. We endlessly debate things like PLG, land/expand, should we use SDRs/BDRs, the roles of AEs/AMs, technologies to extend our outreach and improve our productivity, the use of AI agents, channel/partner strategies, how we grow/expand/upsell/cross sell. We spend endless time discussing precise mathematical models, looking at bow ties, discussing metrics focused on our selling activities. We invest 10’s of millions, theoretically to improve productivity and performance. And when these don’t produce what we want, we double down, doing […]
Rethinking Scaling…..
Scaling is “in fashion.” Our feeds are filled with discussions about scaling, growing regardless of cost. The strategies on scaling have been reduced to mathematical equations that “perfectly” predict how to achieve our goals. Want to grow by 100%, easy—double your outreach and activities, double your pipeline, “poof” you’ve scaled. The path to 100% growth has been mapped. Afterall, math doesn’t lie. And sometimes, if the math doesn’t work perfectly, so we adjust our equations. We might need more outreach, more activities, rather than doubling them, we have to increase them by 2.5 times, but the math works. And there […]
Busy Or Productive?
Early in my career, I kept hearing senior leaders saying something to the effect of, “If I want to get something done, I’m going to give it to the busiest person in my organization….” I’m not quite quoting it in the right context, at the time, the busiest people seemed to be the most productive people. Fast forward to today. Everyone is busy! Or at least seem to present themselves as busy. We are overwhelmed with information and tasks. Despite all the productivity tools we have, despite the ability to search to quickly get information, despite the ability to leverage […]
The “Tell Me More” Problem
LLMs are providing sellers the opportunity to reshape their engagement strategies. Ideally, enabling higher impact first conversations. We can ask the LLM to research the organization, identifying the key issues the company is facing. We can ask the LLM to write a relevant prospecting letter focusing on a certain persona. We can ask it to script a conversation we’d like to have with the customer. And, somewhat surprisingly, the quality of these scripts can be pretty good. We now have the ability, rather than starting with a product pitch, to engage our prospects and customers in a conversation that is […]